Designer Coins

[Lego David]

In a recent article on Featured Set of the Day on Brickset about the Mill Village Raid set, the user Roebuck talked about something known as "Designer Coins".

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However, they had nowhere near as many "designer coins" as I like to call them to include it in the set. What are "designer coins"? Well from what I have understood every set or theme with a wave of sets gets a different amount of "designer coins". If they want a brick in a new colour, make a new print on a part, bring back a part no longer in production etc that cost "designer coins", but nothing costs more than making a new mould.

I never knew those "Designer Coins" even existed before reading that article, so I thought about making a discussion topic here in order to learn more about them. 

Does anyone have any extra info regarding how those "Designer Coins" work? If nothing costs more than making a new mold, then why is seeing discontinued parts return happening so rarely?

Edited April 15, 2020 by Lego David

[Mylenium]

Well, if it's true, then this sounds like a stupid way to go about such matters. I mean budgeting is part of every production/ manufacturing planning, but it should not be dependent on such simplistic metrics and absolute factors.

Mylenium

[howitzer]

35 minutes ago, Lego David said:

<snip>

If nothing costs more than making a new mold, then why is seeing discontinued parts return happening so rarely?

Because new parts for the old mould still probably have to be manufactured, but unlike completely new parts, specifications for them already exist so they don't actually have to design a new mould. This means that returning a discontinued part is less costly investment than designing a completely new one. It's also less risky to bring back an old part because sometimes new parts have unforeseen design defects which have to be corrected if the part's usage is to be continued but that costs then extra in the design and manufacturing of the new mould parts.

[zux]

Depending on a set/theme designers allowed to introduce either new parts or new color for existing bricks. It is unknown what are the limits, but designers are using this to the fullest. From the recent interview with 21322 set designers on Newelementary:

We know that each project is assigned a number of ‘frames’ which are what designers use for new elements, be they printed parts or recolours. By our reckoning, you used 12 of your frames to recolour elements for this set – but perhaps some already existed in other sets we’ve not yet seen?

Milan: It was actually much lower than that which made this a real challenge and no doubt influenced some of the changes we talked about earlier. Austin and I had to beg, borrow and steal in order to make it work – true pirates! Some, like the black barrel were generous ‘donations’ from friends and colleagues. Others were very much needed – I can tell you that the Black Seas Barracuda loses a lot of its pirate appeal with a Vibrant Coral hull.

[Mylenium]

8 minutes ago, howitzer said:

This means that returning a discontinued part is less costly investment than designing a completely new one.

Not really. Why does everyone assume bringing back old parts would be as trivial as pulling an old mold from storage? Even if that's the case, it may require a massive overhaul or a complete work-over to be compatible with contemporary molding machines. Either that or an old mold still needs to be replaced with a completely new one for the same part. At the end of the day reviving an old mold can be just as costly or worse even than creating a new one from scratch.

Mylenium

[howitzer]

2 hours ago, Mylenium said:

Not really. Why does everyone assume bringing back old parts would be as trivial as pulling an old mold from storage? Even if that's the case, it may require a massive overhaul or a complete work-over to be compatible with contemporary molding machines. Either that or an old mold still needs to be replaced with a completely new one for the same part. At the end of the day reviving an old mold can be just as costly or worse even than creating a new one from scratch.

Mylenium

Umm, I don't think you read my comment properly. I said it's _less_ costly than a new part, not that it's trivial or cheap. Yes, the mould parts probably have to be manufactured as I said, but they don't have to be designed from scratch like with a new part, the old design is probably completely usable except perhaps in fitting it for the new machinery (and perhaps not even that, depending on how old the part in question is and how the machinery has changed or not over time). And then there's the issue of quality control, which is already partially done for old moulds, as the part in question has been already tested in the market so there's no new design defects to control for, only possible manufacturing defects. Bringing back an old mould is indeed costly, but probably not as costly as designing a completely new one, at least for the majority of parts.